It's more than delicious food and family celebrations; it's a reminder that you can always do more to fight for the freedom of others.
A student asked me yesterday what Passover is. The simple answer -- it’s my favorite holiday! As a kid, I think I mostly just liked it because it often came on my birthday. Since then I’ve grown to appreciate it for other reasons, and not just for ample pun opportunities (like my husband's #nogefilte or my sister's pun on the many meanings of "hakol b'seder"):
Family
Despite what most of my non-Jewish friends think, Chanukah is not a very important holiday and is usually a really inconvenient time for traveling or taking off from work, being between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, I often don't get to see my family for Chanukah, or really any other Jewish holidays. Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is our Christmas -- the holiday when we all gather and share a big meal.
Food
I love Pesach food! It's traditional to eat parsley dipped in salt water -- an absolute favorite of mine. I eat disgusting amounts of salty parsley. The traditional Hillel sandwich is another highlight -- we spread charoset topped with shaved fresh horseradish root in between pieces of matzah. The combo of the three textures, the bitter and the sweet, is amazing. I ate far too many Hillel sandwiches this year. We also eat gefilte fish (ewww) and hard boiled eggs, again with salt water and/or horseradish. The matzah ball soup is always so good that I'm completely full by the time my grandma's incredible brisket is served. For dessert, we do coffee cake (to die for), fruit salads, and sometimes flourless chocolate cake. The rest of the week can be tough, given that you're not allowed to eat leavened bread or anything with wheat, barley, oats, spelt, or rye; but my grandmother's kosher grocery store (welcome to the Jew haven of West Hartford) makes amazing Kosher l'Pesach tuna salad to spread on matzah, so the deliciousness continues!
Granted, this year was a bit tougher than usual, given that I wasn't supposed to eat coffee cake or brisket or tuna, and I'd been eating matzah all year as the only cracker without added ingredients. I was amazed, however, to discover just how many of my favorite foods I could still do! Parsley, as it turns out, made me feel great! It's anti-histamine and the salt helps keep up my blood pressure. We made tasty matzah ball soup with only low-histamine ingredients. Charoset can be made a million different ways, but my mom made me some with just organic apples and lower-histamine nuts. The eggs could obviously just be made with duck eggs, so no issues there!
Historical (yet so relevant)
This holiday is SO OLD! Aspects of it go back thousands of years, to ancient Egypt. The name "pesach" means the pascal lamb, as in the sacrificial lamb that was ritualistically killed when Jews still prayed at the temple in Jerusalem. The Hillel sandwich mentioned above has been eaten for two thousand years. The first haggadot (books read on Passover) date back a thousand years, but the texts often used today were added several hundred years ago. It is a living text, however, that changes every year as people find new meaning and add new readings. It amazes me that people have been following these same traditions for so long, and yet they still have so much meaning to modern society (and my taste buds).
Spring cleaning
Before the holiday even starts, you're supposed to prepare by cleaning your house, finding all of the chametz (the grains mentioned earlier), and getting rid of it in a number of approved ways. My favorite as a kid was crawling around with a flashlight and collecting crumbs with a feather and spoon, to then cathartically burn in our wood stove. As an agnostic Jew, traditions don't have much importance to me unless I have a) nostalgic memories of enjoying it as a kid or b) can find meaning in my own life. This spring cleaning is a great example of a tradition that brings me a lot of meaning. I tend to fill my space with
clutter. I am so frugal that I hang onto anything that may someday be somewhat useful... until I have so many things that I can't find any of them. I'm also terrible at cleaning out the fridge. So, Passover gives me a specific week that I have to go through everything and get rid of what's no longer bringing me joy. Some years, I use it as a reminder to go through my priorities or how I spend my time and prune some of my metaphorical "chametz." I love that it's in the spring, because once you've cleaned your house and gone through all of your food, pretty soon you can open the windows and feel like your space is fresh and new!
Singing
As a singer from a family that loves to make music together, I love that the holidays give us an opportunity to sing together and try new harmonies. Pesach songs spread a wide range from melancholy to silly to downright competitive.
Order
"Seder" literally means "order." The role of the haggadah is to provide an order or routine for the night so that you don't miss one of the important steps. I happen to thrive on routines and love when social interactions involve some sort of process so I can avoid small talk. Wanna hang? Sure! Show me the games or the schedule and I'm in :-)
Thought-provoking Themes
This is perhaps my favorite. The holiday has specific themes that you are supposed to ponder or discuss. They always feel relevant and each year they take on new meaning. Some of the many topics include:
Renewal, new birth, fresh starts (symbolized by the eggs and the parsley/springtime)
Sacrifice (the pesach, but also characters in the texts who sacrificed themselves for others)
Freedom, slavery, suffering (this one's always interesting in terms of what we see today)
Poverty, helping those in need (the haggaddah mentions multiple times to invite hungry or needy people into your home to share food with them)
Community (it's a shared feast!)
Education (children especially are required to ask questions and learn each year)
Discussion, debate, perspectives (the talmudic texts describe scenes from hundreds of years ago of famous rabbis arguing and finding ways to politely disagree; you're also encouraged, as participants, to spark your own discussions)
What would've been enough? (one song, Dayenu, means "it would've been enough." My family has some issue with this song, but it often sparks cool discussions about what is enough -- how do we know when we've done enough for others? How far do we go to keep fighting or supporting?)
Never again (the story of the Exodus from Egypt is told and retold as a way to remind us that we were once slaves and then refugees, to have empathy for others, and to never again allow this kind of persecution to others. This, I think, is a huge part of my love for Pesach -- a yearly reminder to keep fighting for refugees, racial minorities, and anyone else experiencing systematic oppression, and a way to remember my family members who went through the Holocaust as well as anyone killed by bigotry)
Discussions my family has had at these Seders have been some of the most thought-provoking and challenging of my life. We often come back to the same thought -- it's all well and good to talk about these things, but what's next? What actions can we actually take to help others? Seder discussions were catalysts for my current understanding of the Snowden scandal and white privilege in America (my cousin had just read The New Jim Crow), among others. Additionally cool is that my family tries to come up with topics ahead of time, so I spend the weeks before the Seder looking at life through a different lens, trying to think about what I could share. This year, it led to a revelation in my teaching; I was thinking about one of my least favorite parts of the Haggadah, the four sons, when I realized that I could see all four in my students, and what created those four personalities was how adults have treated them for years. If I treat a student as different or unworthy, they will become rebellious. If a student is always given answers without being challenged to ask their own questions, they will never learn how to ask. It helped me shift my thinking towards many of my tougher or more puzzling students.
Two of the topics brought up this year were particularly meaningful for me. At the first seder, my brother-in-law shared a reading he'd seen about the difference between being hungry/poor and being needy. The Haggadah mentions both, asking you to invite the hungry to your meal, but to invite the needy to share the holiday with you. It was a cool reminder that though it is valuable to donate money and food to those in need, there are also people who may have everything on the surface, but are lonely and in need of company, or sick and in need of support, etc.
The second night, my sister had shared this story:
One Sunday morning in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, a mysterious character rode up on his bicycle and entered the Calvinist Church. He ascended the podium and read aloud the story of the midwives who saved the Hebrew babies and defied Pharaoh’s policy of genocide. “Who is today’s Pharaoh?” he asked. “Hitler,” the congregation replied. “Who are today’s Hebrew babies?” “The Jews.” “Who will be today’s midwives?” He left the church, leaving his question hanging in the air. During the war (1941-1945) seven families from this little church hid Jews and other resistors from from the Nazis.
- A different Night by Noam Zion and David Dishon
The question was then asked, in today's America, who are the Pharaohs and who are the Hebrew babies? And how much of your own happiness/safety are you willing to risk to help them?
I will continue thinking about this long after the glow of Passover has left me, and that is why this holiday is so important.